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« on: January 26, 2017, 11:06:37 pm »
... y'know, reading that, it immediately hit me you'd be able to do a workable dance editor for that, that only uses somewhere in the range of three to six buttons. And could be done pretty much on the fly. One for feet, one for hands, one for head (the last is particularly important, since it allows for spinning like a top while upside down, breakdancing to break down barricades), move your cursor where you want it to go and press the button, hold it down and move to adjust facing (up/down for incline, left/right for rotation?). One or two modifiers (shift, control, whatever) to alternate which side to place (option there to do it automatically on placement, mind) and whether they're sequential or simultaneous (maybe a hold and drag with those, to adjust timing more precisely). Possibly a final one to skip a step for a particular limb, with one modifier skipping all and the other adjusting whether the limb tries to hold position or goes limp.
Making the dance would just take moving the cursor around, tapping buttons to tell limbs where to go and in what order. Once you're comfortable with it, you could probably belt out a fifty, sixty step dance of planet destroying intricacy in less than a minute.
Design the editor itself to work in a gridded cube (there's a possibility for a seventh button to hit, there, to adjust distance within the 3d space), and you can use an x,y,z coordinate system to score effectiveness (comparing placement to an optimal set determined one way or another,* and probably randomizing to some degree as play continues, based on certain algorithms), determining the relative strength of the dance compared to the shifting dance meta developing as you and the AI attempt to out do each other. You'd probably start games with a pseudo-random set (predefined, but only a subset chosen at a time) of relatively simple dances, pulled from a database of real life ones converted to the grid system.
Ultimately, your strategic war would be fought over control of the rhythmic influences, pulling the noted meta (/scene/whatever; what's in vogue determines the effectiveness of the gigatons of plasmatic destruction your units output, and said stylishly flailing plasmatic destruction determines what's in vogue) towards your units' strengths or pushing it away from your enemy's. The tactical war, of course, would involve dancing machines that explode chunks of the enemy's army when they pull off a particularly good move. Add in a randomization factor of some sort (neutral units/critters running off AI that can push the scene in unexpected directions) to keep the game from devolving into a solidified... well, meta meta, I guess. And you're golden.
*There'd be room for a lot of research modifiers, there. Instead of weapon damage or whatever, you'd be able to adjust the effect of pattern deviation and/or adherence, so you can make it so your units become more effective by significant experimentation and divergence, or by crisp movement and performance (this would also allow for a sort of action/reaction switch, where if you lose ground with experimentation, you can steal it back with perfection, and then pull ahead yourself and the cycle potentially continues). Much of it would be exclusive, where picking one direction shuts you off or weakens you in another, with means to effectively "lock in" certain things (strong battlefield dominance over whatever is being considered), preventing the enemy from choosing that "research path" outright or drastically reducing the effect they get from it (in the short term, at the least).
Real trick you could have there, is split things up between unit types. You'd have "heroes"/elite units/prototypes that are particularly effective at experimentation and innovation... and possibly have various benefits from diverging with specific limbs, or in specific ways -- a head spider dancebot would get a boost from having spread out limbs, ferex, and some other one could get extra effect from vertical displacement, making something that benefits substantially from flips and aerial maneuvers. Crabbot would be best at breakdancing, stuff that inverts their top/bottom orientation. The mighty doublebot that is particularly effective with left limbs, proving once and for all that two left feet is the king of the dancefloor, not its jester. Things of that nature.
Meanwhile, your rank and file could get their best performance when they're most precisely mimicking the efforts of one the elites, or when in support of one -- naturally, you could also ping your guys off theirs, and there'd probably be specific subversion units that do their best when co-opting enemy dance patterns.
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... won't lie, now I want to see it just to see it. It'd be a helluva' experiment just to see who could play something like that at a high level. It'd almost be like some kind of freakish fusion between toribash and bullet hell games, except with an additional strategic layer demanding you out think not just the enemy's current patterns, but what direction they intend to take it in the future and how both they and you are going to adjust to unexpected shocks (both induced by each other and otherwise) and the collective shifting of all sorts of various unit mobs interacting with their own types and playing off others. A game of trends centered around what amounts to an RTS powered by on the fly rhythm-centered toribash. My mind can see it, but the reality is like a glowing light, far off over the horizon.
Also this now long enough I'm starting to have second thoughts about posting, so it's time to post and stop thinking.
